updated 09:35 pm EDT, Thu May 2, 2013

Samsung not forthcoming with user-available space on 16GB model

Early purchasers of the Samsung Galaxy S4 have discovered that approximately 45 percent of the storage on the 16GB model is occupied by Samsung's Android implementation, and unusable by the owner. Upon inspection of the device, the base Galaxy S4 model has only 8.82GB available to the user -- with the rest filled by Samsung with new features like the TouchWiz UI, Samsung Hub, and ChatON.

Other phones have far less pre-utilized space. The HTC One 16GB phone has 7.14GB occupied by its branch of Android. The iPhone 5 has about 3.5GB of space occupied by essential system software and Apple-provided apps out of the box regardless of capacity. The Galaxy S4's storage can be expanded with a MicroSD card, somewhat mitigating the lack of available internal storage.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is not the first device that has suffered from users complaining about available storage. Microsoft came under fire for both its RT and Windows 8 versions of the Surface tablet for not disclosing available space after the factory-standard installation and recovery partitions were accounted for.

The space dedicated to the OS on the Galaxy S3 is indeed quite large, but Touch With on this device is so full of UI enhancements over plain vanilla Jellybean Android It feels like a whole new OS without being intrusive or even departing too far from the stock Android experience.

The non-touch gestures alone is invaluable for those times you are not able to touch your phone, say for example on the kitchen reading a cooking recepie and needing to scroll down. This is innovation; it's not to be criticized but praised.

And the fact that you have the flexibility of changing your external memory at any time is invaluable.

Well that, and replaceable batteries to boot!

The value Electronista's articles would be enhanced by just being fair, this would shou intelligence on the part of the writers, and educate diehard users on other operating systems.

Wow. Shill much? I am fully aware of the Samsung features in the phone. We've done a hands-on of the device and generally like it. A full review is underway. It's not a perfect device, but it is generally solid.

Fact: "Pro" users increase capacity on the phone, most users do not.

Fact: Increasing the storage is a nonzero expense (but not a super-major one)

Fact: Like everybody else, Samsung doesn't say anything about the out of the box utilization. Given the percentage, this is more egregious than just a few gig unavailable.

Fact: Despite all the new innovations, 45% of the base storage is unavailable to the user, and that's what the article is about.

Let's talk fair for a moment. Other venues call this "nearly 50%." I guess technically it is, but isn't 45% more fair? Isn't the fact that we mentioned that storage is expandable fair, a fact that's been overlooked by a few outlets? Ma and Pa SamsungUser are likely to just notice that they can't quite seem to store as many kids' pictures on it as they might like. Don't you think that they should know?

And if you want to call people names (which I have edited out), keep it to the general forums.

Actually, aside from the slightly larger screen, better CPU and battery, it seems all the Galaxy S4's "bells and whistles" should work OK on the Galaxy S3 with a firmware upgrade, should Samsung decide to make it available; however, this would make the S4 less of a compelling upgrade for some Galaxy owners than it is now.